With a great prize comes great responsibility

What an extraordinarily ungracious article!

Some people are not obsessed by gender... and feel capable of standing or falling based on their own accomplishments. The best way to fight sexism is to start ignoring gender, rather than continuing to talk about it as if it were significant. In a true equal society, gender does not matter... so why talk about it as if it did. Indeed I once walked out of a job interview when it became obvious that I had been invited just so that there was a female candidate!

Professor Notaro makes many valid points. I only wish she had not chosen this occasion -- or target -- to make them. When men win Nobel prizes they are showered with accolades and nothing but. Now a woman wins one (after 55 years) she is showered with coarse abuse -- in an article that bemoans the abuse and underappreciation of women. Professor Notaro is obviously right to insist that women have it tough in academia. Reading her article, I now understand why Professor Strickland has tried to avoid the limelight.

This is an irrational rant against a real role model to women in physics written by an outsider to the field, who clearly doesn't get it. In physics we say that we stand on the shoulders of giants to see further. It seems as though the author is standing on the head of a giant to be seen from further. She has used the fame of the only living women with a Physics Nobel prize to draw attention to herself and raise her own profile by trying to tear her down all in the name of so-called feminism.

HI Cosmo, as for drawing attention to myself I can assure you that my ego is not as big as the one of someone who chooses *Cosmo* as a nickname, in the Humanities we call that ironic. Also, not sure it is good practice for a *scientist* to speculate on the author's motivations for writing the piece without having any knowledge with regard to the author's expertise/scholarship in the field of gender equality/inclusivity (from an interdisciplinary perspective) in academia.